The Da Vinci Code《达•芬奇密码》（精讲之三）

Andre Vernet: Understood. Keys are often passed on and first-time users are sometimes uncertain of protocol. Keys are essentially numbered Swiss accounts. Often willed through generations. Is it yours, mademoiselle? The shortest safety-deposit-box lease is 50 years.

Sophie: And what's your longest account?

Andre Vernet: Quite a bit longer. Technologies change, keys are updated. But our accounts date back to the beginning of banking itself. Once the computer confirms your key, enter your account number and your box is retrieved. The room is yours, as long as you like.

Sophie: What if I lost track of my account number? How might I recover it?

Andre Vernet: I’m afraid each key is paired with a 10-digit number, known only to the account bearer. I hope you manage to remember it. A single wrong entry disables the system.

A portion of the Arthurian cycle of romance, of late origin, embodying a number of tales dealing with the search for a certain vessel of great sanctity called the "Grail" or "Graal." Versions of the story are numerous, the most celebrated of them being the Conte del Graal, the Grand St. Graal, Sir Percyvalle, Quete del St. Graal, and Guyot, but there are also many others. These overlap in many respects, but the standard form of the story may perhaps be found in the Grand St. Graal, one of the latest versions, which dates from the thirteenth century.

It tells how Joseph of Arimathea employed a dish used at the Last Supper to catch the blood of the Redeemer, which flowed from his body before his burial. The wanderings of Joseph are then described. He leads a band to Britain, where he is cast into prison, but is delivered by Evelach or Mordrains, who is instructed by Christ to assist him. Mordrains builds a monastery where the Grail is housed. Brons, Joseph's brother-in-law, has a son Alain, who is appointed guardian of the Grail. Alain, having caught a great fish with which he feeds the entire household, is called "the Rich Fisher," which becomes the perpetual title of the Grail keepers. Alain places the Grail in the castle of Corbenic and in time, various knights of King Arthur's court come in quest of the holy vessel. Only the purest of the pure could approach it, and in due time the knight Percival manages to see the marvel.

It is probable that the idea of the Grail originated with early medieval legends of the quest for talismans that conferred great boons upon the finder, for example, the shoes of swiftness, the cloak of invisibility, and the ring of Gyges, and that these stories were interpreted in the light and spirit of medieval Christianity and mysticism.

The legends may be divided into two classes: those that are connected with the quest for certain talismans, of which the Grail is only one, and that deal with the personality of the hero who achieves the quest; and second, those that deal with the nature and history of the talismans.

The Damsel of the Sanct Grael by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A great deal of controversy has raged around the possible Eastern origin of the Grail legend. Much erudition has been employed to show that Guyot, a Provençal poet who flourished in the middle of the twelfth century, found at Toledo, Spain, an Arabian book by an astrologer, Flegitanis, which contained the Grail story. But the name "Flegitanis" can by no means be an Arabian proper name. It could be the Persian felekedânêh, a combined word which signifies "astrology," and in that case it would be the title of an astrological work. Some believed the legend originated in the mind of Guyot himself, but this conclusion was strongly opposed by the folklorist Alfred Nutt. There is, however, some reason to believe that the story might have been brought from the East by the Knights Templar.

The Grail legend has often been held by various ecclesiastical apologists to support theories that either the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church has existed since the foundation of the world. From early Christian times the genealogy of these churches has been traced back through the patriarchs to numerous apocryphal persons, although it is not stated whether the religions possessed hierophants in neolithic and paleolithic times, or just how they originated. Such theories, which would logically identify Christianity with the grossest forms of paganism, are confined only to a small group.

The Grail legend was readily embraced by those who saw in it a link between Palestine and England and an argument for the special separate foundation of the Anglican Church by direct emissaries from the Holy Land. Glastonbury was fixed as the headquarters of the Grail immigrants, and the finding of a glass dish in the vicinity of the cathedral there some years ago was held to be confirmation of the story by many of the faithful. The exact date of this vessel was not definitely estimated, but there seemed little reason to suppose that it was more than a few hundred years old.

A new conspiratorial interpretation of the Grail legend is offered in the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Their speculation involves suggestions that Jesus did not die on the Cross, but married and had children. His wife, they postulate, fled to the south of France with her family, taking with her the "Royal and Real Blood," the "Sang-real" or Grail of medieval romance. This line will supposedly culminate in a second Messiah, all this being the secret of an order named the Prieure de Sion. Apparently the investigation of this amazing story began with the mystery of Berenger Sauniere, a parish priest at Rennes-le-Château in the Pyrenees, who seemed to have discovered a secret that gave him access to a vast sum of money before his death, under mysterious circumstances, in 1917. That secret involved the history of Rennes-le-Château and its association with the Templars, the Cathars, and the royal bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty. The story has too many jumps in history and logic to ever be researched, and only time will show whether its major claims can be independently substantiated.

Patricia and Lionel Fanthorpe refute the theory of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln in their 1982 book The Holy Grail Revealed: The Real Secret of Rennes-le-Château.